Audiobooks: Are they really the same as reading?

Ball of crumpled paper from book with headphones (Tooga, Getty Images)

Jenni LaidmanSpecial to Tribune newspapers

It was Ron Silver.

That voice, with its slight rasp and its tendency to drop at the end of a passage, as though the actor cradled disappointment tightly against his chest, startled me. It was 2006; I had been a regular recorded books listener for three years. But until I heard the late Ron Silver's incarnation as the Nathan Zuckerman of my imagination, I failed to realize that recorded books were more than some guy reading.

When I think back, that should have been obvious from the first time I picked up a recorded novel to accompany me on a long drive to Alabama: T.C. Boyle's "Drop City," read by Richard Poe. As I sped down Interstate 65 that February, I lived a double life. Watching spring overtake the landscape as I drove southward toward Birmingham, my mind rushed north at a similar pace, traveling with a band of hippies as they made their way with life-threatening foolishness to Alaska.

I took for granted then that a recorded book should so easily fill my imagination. I was intent instead on this new way to avoid the mindless parts of life. Dull drives and routine tasks could now be spent among interesting people living complicated lives.

So, as hammered and heartbroken as Silver and Roth left me at the close of "American Pastoral," I was in love, in love with the voice, the voice of Zuckerman, and the fresh discovery that this wasn't just a guy reading. This was performance.

Still, more than 100 audiobooks later, I remain on the fence between reading and listening. Audiobooks are good. They're enjoyable. They're wonderfully efficient. But I wonder if the audiobook experience is quite as full and as nuanced as reading. Is the world I create as a listener as rich as the one I form as a reader? Then again, there's Silver and the intimacy of a performance even more personal than reading and more original than I would have conjured. I cannot decide.

So I talked to Don Katz, the Chicago native behind an audiobook revolution. He is the founder and CEO of Audible, one of the biggest providers of spoken books.

Katz is a word guy , a writer turned entrepreneur. He is the author of three books, including "Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle Class Family in Postwar America," as well as books about Sears and Nike. He wrote for Rolling Stone, Esquire and Sports Illustrated. While researching a book on the digital revolution in the mid-1990s, he saw how easily spoken word could be compressed for download.

"I just got obsessed with this idea," Katz says. "My first book took me six years. My second book took me five, so I thought, you know, how long can a company take?"

He started the company in 1995, launched the e-commerce website Audible.com two years later, guided the company through several near-death experiences while the world caught up and bought iPods, and finally fostered its success. He took Audible public in 1999. Amazon bought it in 2008, although he still runs it. In addition to Audible website sales, Audible supplies Amazon's recorded books, as well as the Apple iTunes Store.

Audible doesn't release sales number, and Katz says published estimates are out of date and inaccurate, but he puts the number of his listeners "in the millions," and says unit sales have consistently grown "way over 40 percent year over year."

People take up listening to books for any number of reasons, including staying ahead of the guy in the next cubicle, Katz says, but the experience can hook us at a much deeper level.

"It is really much more connected to the pleasures of being read to as a child and our fundamental love of storytelling," Katz says. "In the hands of a really good performer, it becomes an art form all in itself, and the book is a script."

When he started Audible, audiobooks were the neglected stepchild of the publishing industry, with a limited selection of expensive titles sold at the back of book stores or available in public libraries, Katz says.

Perhaps even worse, some readings were dreadful.

"Several of the companies that made audiobooks, largely to be put in libraries, the actors were told to back off and read bland," Katz said. "How crazy is this?

For him, the recorded-book experience is the complete experience. Although in past interviews Katz has talked about setting aside certain books for reading, that is seldom the case now. "These days, I listen, unless it isn't available," he said. Still, he recently both listened to and read a book by one of his favorite authors, Tom McGuane.

Personally, if I read a book after listening to it, it's because I haven't gotten my fill of the language. I want to spend more time running the prose across my tongue, reveling in the writer's grace notes.

This ability to savor is missing from the recorded books experience. Mp3 players don't accommodate thoughtful pauses. Scroll back to a review a passage, and you are suddenly three chapters off and now unable to find your place.

"We're working on that," Katz says.

Arnold L. Glass, a professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, studies the ways in which reading and listening differ. But if one mode is superior to the other, it's not quite clear.

Listening has one outstanding advantage over reading, his research shows. When we listen, the theater in our head is in full operation. When we read, the screen may flicker. Reading monopolizes the visual part of our brain, the place where we form mental images, his 1980 study shows. He asked subjects to determine the accuracy of sentences loaded with imagery and sentences with little imagery. He found that reading slowed judgment on high-imagery sentences. But if subjects listened to the sentences instead, judgment time was the same, no matter the level of imagery.

Reading, for all its virtues, seems to get in the way.

"Reading is extremely efficient. It occurs automatically. If I show you a word, you can't avoid reading it. Basically, that's a good thing," Glass says. "But it hijacks your mental machinery, slowing down and interfering with the process of understanding what you read."

What to conclude from this finding isn't so obvious. The benefit of listening over reading may only be important if you're in a hurry. But remove the time pressure, "and both situations are pretty efficient," Glass says.

On final analysis, maybe it's foolish to rule reading better than listening or vice versa. As Katz says, audiobooks are a distinct art form. As much as listening shares with reading, it is not reading. It can be more satisfying than reading and it can be less. But with so many books and so little time, audiobooks aren't going anywhere. And wouldn't you say, no matter how you consume the written word, it's all good?

Click here to read about five great narrators and listen to clips of their best performances.

This story originally appeared in the Printers Row Journal, a weekly magazine covering all things literary. Click here to learn more about Printers Row.